Title: Claim to the country: the archive of Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd
Compiled by: Pippa Skotnes
Publisher: Jacana
ISBN: 9781770093379
Publication date: May 2007
Pippa Skotnes and the /xam go back a long way. Claim to the Country is "the result of a twenty-year love affair with an archive," she writes in the introduction, and if the story of Wilhelm Bleek, Lucy Lloyd, //Kabbo and his kinsmen is by now a familiar one, this is in no small part due to her singular vision and (as she readily admits), obsessive dedication.
Displaced from their home in the northern Cape and sentenced to hard labour in the Breakwater Prison in the late 19th century, /A!kúnta, Diä!kwain, /Han≠kass’o, //Kabbo and a handful of others were received in the home of this Prussian linguist and his English sister-in-law as valued guests and storytellers. Comprising over 13 000 notebook pages of phonetic transcription and painstaking translation, the Bleek and Lloyd collection represents the most important record of the verbal lore of the first inhabitants of southern Africa. Its testimonies occasionally depart from the tales of animals, stars and customs to record the brutal intrusion of white settlers in an area which had been inhabited for at least twice as long as the European continent when the trekboers arrived in their slow drift from the south.
In the course of her love affair, Skotnes has approached the archive from various angles, always intent on conveying not simply the textual matter of the collection, but its whole aesthetic. In 1991 she published Sound from the Thinking Strings, a limited edition volume of /xam-inspired etchings, essays and poems so exquisite that its creator was embroiled in legal action when the South African Library sued for copies and she refused, claiming it was more artwork than book. In 1996, concerned that the well-known diorama of “traditional” Bushman figures in the South African Museum represented nothing but “a sanitized translation of nineteenth-century freak shows”, she replaced it with a conceptual installation of headless torsos and dismembered limbs, arranged to suggest “a symbolic Last Supper in which the Bushman body was the sacrifice”. Some visiting delegations who claimed Khoisan descent felt that post-modern museum display was getting ahead of itself, but this debate was soon upstaged by the appearance of a group in loincloths and skins who seemed to have stepped straight out of the original diorama. Inhabitants of a “traditional” reserve / tourist attraction in the Cape fold mountains, they were in turn berated by a “brown Afrikaner” pressure group in suits while the press looked on.
The rediscovery of the Bleek and Lloyd collection has been one of the major events of South African scholarship in the last decades, bringing archaeology, linguistics, literature, rock art studies and cultural politics together in an attempt to explicate this remarkable archive. And as the above suggests, the process was not without its controversial moments: poets have accused each other of plagiarism, professors have debated the finer points of shamanistic trance states, post-colonialists have reacted against romantic visions of cultural exchange in the Victorian garden village of Mowbray. Yet if the Miscast exhibition represented the beginnings of this process - with its avant garde shock tactics intended to jolt the public into a realisation of a forgotten, genocidal history - Claim to the Country seems like its triumphant conclusion, a no-expense-spared celebration that this rare and precious instance of dialogue has been enshrined as a cornerstone of post-apartheid South African culture.
Before it has even begun, an overture of photographic portraits and a list of names pages long credits not only the makers of the archive, but all those /xam individuals who appear in its narratives, songs and genealogies. In terms of commemorating a vanished culture and refusing to appropriate its voices as one's own, it is scrupulously careful, but also beautiful. If the book which accompanied Miscast conveyed an almost overwhelming violence against the Bushman body - ripped pages, trophy heads with glassy eyes and anthropometric photographs which made some question whether it was appropriate even to bring these images into public view once more - Claim to the Country has a very different feel, one of gentleness, domesticity and intricate personal detail. Turning the carefully arranged pages, one can find scruffy drafts of letters, news clippings from the colonial press, household accounts in the crabbed handwriting which record "Preliminary expenses for the reception of the first Bushman August 1870" (/a!kunta), "Cost of an invalided constable who was in charge of the first Bushman for five months" and another entry for "Equipping Klein Jantje for journey to Bushman land (to fetch the wives)".
This method of random paging is recommended in the introduction. Seeing her role as that of curator rather than editor, Skotnes writes that instead of trying to recreate a history, compile a narrative or offer an interpretation of indigenous thought, the book attempts "to present the archive itself". This should not be thought of as a dusty, forgotten repository but a dynamic space "in which one can never be a passive participant, where one must constantly be alert to new possibilities, to different insights, to other ways of understanding the complexities of the past". As in her installations, where an absence of information panels and the lack of any proscribed route meant that the viewer was required to adopt a personal, non-linear way through, there is in this book a sense of merely bringing objects into relation and allowing them to stand for themselves, of historical artefacts left intact and immanent to a remarkable degree given the limitations of a two-dimensional page. Layout and design can be so much more than just a way of arranging information, she writes; images are not merely illustration, and "the visual presence of the book is as important a component of what it is trying to accomplish as any of the text."
The result is a book where the text is in fact overwhelmed by the visual, where a single close-up of a watercolour or annotated map drawn by the informants seems to say more than a dozen supporting essays. Demanding an amount of time and a level of technology made possible only by generous patrons (whose donation letters are duly scanned in), it conveys with an intense fidelity the grainy, physical presence of the documents and photographs which make up the collection. This is a love affair expressed in the texture of paper, in the marbled spines of the notebooks, in the worn Description Register of prisoners at the Breakwater Convict Station which doubles as dust jacket. The "G Rowney and Co" sketch pads and "Championship Stitchless" tennis ball boxes used in compiling a /xam dictionary are a reminder that the fascination of this archive and its distinct aesthetic lives not only in the recorded material, but in the interaction between a particular Victorian household and the /xam informants, or as Lucy Lloyd preferred to call them, "givers of native literature". Not only the contents but also the covers of the notebooks deserve attention, and on Wilhelm Bleek's very first of 1886–71, one can even see teacup rings.
More than this, in its survey of a living community of scholarship, literature and graphic art the book respects //Kabbo's wish that the stories should become well-known and widespread through books, and Bleek's request in his will that the Bushman material be "worked well out".
For Skotnes the boundaries of the collection are not fixed in the 19th century; instead they expand constantly to include secondary materials which do not so much explicate from a distance as become part of the archive itself. As such, the essays included here contain several revisitings and rereadings, personal accounts from figures who were instrumental in bringing the collection into the public domain and now look back on their early efforts.
We see copies of the letters exchanged between the anthropologist Roger Hewitt and the University of Cape Town library in the 1970s as he badgered them about the notebooks of Lucy Lloyd and eventually paid an assistant to locate an archive that had been all but forgotten. The rock art guru David Lewis-Williams explains his debt to the archive not as a simple means of decoding of the paintings, but as a rich source in apprehending the deep metaphoric structures running through the literature and across the rock surfaces of what has been called the longest continuous artistic tradition in human history. He also lets us know how President Mbeki came to him for help in finding a motto for the new South Africa's coat of arms: !ke e:/xarra //ke - "diverse people unite", or more accurately, given the lack of Latinate overtones in South Africa's own dead language, "people who are different come together".
On the one hand this enshrining of /xam on the national crest is heartening; on the other it does lead one to question whether this and other well-meaning interventions too easily consign this culture to the status of historical relic, implying that its legacy is one that can be left safely in the past. An enervating sense of heritage does hang over some of the more self-congratulatory essays, but one which breaks new ground, and seeks for live continuities between present and past, is that by Anthony Traill, "!Khwa-Ka Hhouiten Hhoutien, 'The Rush of the Storm': the Linguistic Death of /xam". In the course of enquiring why the disappearance of the language appears so abrupt in the historical record, he reminds us of the multilingual nature of Bleek and Lloyd's enterprise, and dispels a tendency to see this archive initiated by an Anglophile professor as the sole preserve of a certain strain of academic, English-speaking, Capetonian liberalism.
When Bleek's daughter Dorothea visited the northern Cape in 1910, the /xam language was obviously on the verge of extinction, despite the fact that the narrators of the late 19th century seemed to have been working in a robust and confident idiom. Beginning with evidence of the essential role of Dutch as mediating language in Bleek's early learning process, Traill amasses evidence for a long history of bilingualism on this forgotten frontier of the Cape Colony. As a result the shift to a community of monolingual Afrikaans speakers was a rapid one, bearing out Eugène Marais's account in the preface to his 1927 Dwaalstories of how, "toe die Boesmantaal self aan uitsterwe was, het die vertellers die stories in hulle eienaardige Afrikaans oorgesit". Traill cites the reminiscences of GR von Wielligh, an early Afrikaans anthologist of "Boesman Stories" who accompanied his father on surveying trips through Namaqualand, Bushmanland and the Hantam between 1870 and 1883, writing of how "baie van die oudjies ... [het] by ons wavuur kom aansit om te gesels ... vir 'n geringe vergoeding was hulle te gewillig om aan die kleinbasie stories te vertel." As the linguist remarks:
It is intriguing to think that some of the stories were being told to Von Wielligh at Katkop and Limoenkop only a few kilometres away from "Grass" /xam at the very time that Bleek and Lloyd were recording them from ≠Kasin and Diä!kwain in Cape Town.
Remarkably, after the last page has been turned, the major part of the project is still to come. The Digital Bleek and Lloyd contained in a DVD wedged into the back cover includes scans of the 13 000 notebook spreads which make up the core of the archive: right-hand pages divided into two columns for dictation and translation, the opposite sheets left open for afterthoughts and glosses. Not only this, but all the drawings and watercolours made by the various /xam narrators, deeply beautiful sketches of rain animals, porcupine spoor, edible plants and maps of a lost home. All of it is indexed in a way which enables searching by contributor, category, story or even keyword. Representing a decade's worth of labour, this induction of Bleek and Lloyd into the Google era allows one to trace narratives which span notebooks, to track popular motifs between narrators, or simply to browse page by page.
A keyword search quickly allows one to find the original transcriptions of celebrated excerpts like "The Song of the Broken String" or "//Kabbo's Intended Return Home”. Following the original, diligent and cramped script, one can approach what for many is a kind of Holy Grail of southern African literature, and the experience of seeing these pages which register all the strains and losses of transmission is surely a more vital experience than any encounter with modern adaptations. The ongoing debates about whether prose or poetry, free verse or controlled stanzas are more suitable for approaching the collection seem suddenly unnecessary: here we are able to experience first-hand a language event best evoked by Hewitt when he describes "the continuous embeddedness of belief, feeling and thought that Bleek and especially Lloyd rendered through a quasi-Elizabethan or Jacobean English that, in the rigour of its attempted faithfulness to the /xam, is not embarrassed to pile up awkwardnesses and to achieve, by a kind of accident, a luminous poetry of its own”.